A recent Richard Hanania piece on violence, Latin America, and democracy reminded me of an interesting paper I read last year in The British Journal of Criminology. Using lots of different democracy data, it argued that there’s a positive relationship, net of confounders, between political freedom and homicide (while economic development helps ameliorate it, as we’ve known for a while now). The paper is not particularly impressive in terms of causal inference, but it does quite a few things in terms of robustness testing and is overall convincing at least in descriptive terms. So, democracy and homicide really do go together?
I'm not sure about the idea of looking at transitions to democracy worldwide. Late twentieth, early twenty-first century has a lot of Eastern European nations in the sample. It seems that Europe has just figured out how to control violence. Whatever their circumstances, people of European and East Asian descent just don't commit a lot of crime anywhere. I think the best evidence is qualitative. We know Latin America gives a lot of rights to criminals, and has a lot of violence. Again, democracy is necessary but not sufficient. Its might not even have any predictive value at all outside Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Interesting discussion, my own takeaway from what you said so far is that the research on this topic is kind of limited and not very great right now, so we should be sceptical and agnostic about the issue right now. Even so I wonder what the effect of transitions to autocracy is even if it turns out that transitions to democracy are bad in the short term. I’m not seeing anything in those papers that distinguish between this possibility and the possibility that governments in transitions are not very stable or good at maintaining law and order. Would be interesting to see what happens if you look at hybrid countries drifting towards autocracy. El Salvador is a counter example, obviously, but that’s like one example, although of course I already said, we should be pretty doubtful about the story where changes in the level of democracy, have any effect on this, and even if the effect is real, I expect it’s pretty small or it wouldn’t be this hard to tell.
The state-capacity framing seems more convincing than the democracy framing.
Political openness can expose conflict, mobilize factions, and weaken old coercive controls, but homicide depends on whether institutions can actually process disputes, enforce rules, and monopolize violence.
The dangerous zone is not democracy itself.
It is participation expanding faster than coordination capacity.
I'm not sure about the idea of looking at transitions to democracy worldwide. Late twentieth, early twenty-first century has a lot of Eastern European nations in the sample. It seems that Europe has just figured out how to control violence. Whatever their circumstances, people of European and East Asian descent just don't commit a lot of crime anywhere. I think the best evidence is qualitative. We know Latin America gives a lot of rights to criminals, and has a lot of violence. Again, democracy is necessary but not sufficient. Its might not even have any predictive value at all outside Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Interesting discussion, my own takeaway from what you said so far is that the research on this topic is kind of limited and not very great right now, so we should be sceptical and agnostic about the issue right now. Even so I wonder what the effect of transitions to autocracy is even if it turns out that transitions to democracy are bad in the short term. I’m not seeing anything in those papers that distinguish between this possibility and the possibility that governments in transitions are not very stable or good at maintaining law and order. Would be interesting to see what happens if you look at hybrid countries drifting towards autocracy. El Salvador is a counter example, obviously, but that’s like one example, although of course I already said, we should be pretty doubtful about the story where changes in the level of democracy, have any effect on this, and even if the effect is real, I expect it’s pretty small or it wouldn’t be this hard to tell.
The state-capacity framing seems more convincing than the democracy framing.
Political openness can expose conflict, mobilize factions, and weaken old coercive controls, but homicide depends on whether institutions can actually process disputes, enforce rules, and monopolize violence.
The dangerous zone is not democracy itself.
It is participation expanding faster than coordination capacity.